


Close Your Eyes, Be Patient

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Best Friends to Lovers, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Hugs, Pre-Relationship, and despite tht description it is completely g rated, essentially an evolution of touch through the ages, truly domesticity at its finest folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-13 13:22:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18469813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: They have been many things to one another, and though that can't be found in a name most days, it's constantly defined and redefined by calculated touch.





	Close Your Eyes, Be Patient

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first fic idea i had when i started watching the show a month ago and now im using it to avoid watching season nine - truly full circle.
> 
> its p abstract so it doesn't have a set place in the timeline (nor do i think it contains any spoilers for tht matter) so just. go with me on this and no one mention canon gksjdjs
> 
> title from patient by bad suns

THE BEFORE

He stood in his forlorness like it was a new winter coat. It was draped across the downward curve of his shoulders, tugging impishly at his struggling-to-remain-steady mouth. It wasn't that she'd never seen him like this - as much as he tried to hide it, she knew there were certain cases that kept him awake long into the night, same as her - it was just that she'd never seen it so set in.

Usually he could shake it off, keep going straight into whatever else there was to find in the great unknown, but now there wasn't quite anything for him to do. Their motel was already paid through the night, their flight not set to depart until the next afternoon. All the paperwork that could be had already been taken care of, courtesy of his shaking hand. There was nothing to go forward to, not for some time.

And secretly she couldn't stand that, was racking her brain to try and find something for them to do, one last thread to tie up, anything to spark some life back into his five o'clock shadowed face. 

But there was nothing that she could offer except the bucket of melted ice on her standard issue bureau and whatever could be salvaged from the wavelengths of the TV screen at that odd hour. 

Which really meant there was nothing she could offer that wasn't, perhaps, crossing a line.

Scully exhaled, breath sharp against her throat already. "Mulder…" she finally murmured, arms crossed dutifully over her chest, fingers clenched into skin to keep them from reaching out.

Something in his silence made her think that lines were the last thing she should be considering.

There was always fight in Fox Mulder, that was never the fear, but when it was gone- when it was gone the world's axes tilted and the sun and the moon swapped places and nothing was ever right. To see him like this was to watch the fuse blow in a lightbulb and be drenched in darkness. Her guiding light was gone, and she thought that maybe, this once, desperate measures were all right to be enacted.

His face was bathed in concentration, seemingly only held together by steadily fraying threads. That tick he got in his jaw when he was especially upset was ever present, scraping like a saw through the remaining fibers, threatening to fell him, leave him as limp as an unused marionette.

It was calculated, her effort. With him she hadn't ever been one for displays of anything but professionalism, and on occasion affection that could be thwarted at a moment's notice. So here, it was an effort.

First it came in the untangling on her limbs, removing taut fingers from taut muscles, extracting herself from within her own mind. Then it was the click of her thick heels across the floor, sending up signals to be intercepted - she could be stopped, that much was clear, but she didn't, he didn't. She could be, but she wouldn't be.

He just eyed her, his hair plastered flat across his forehead in that way that made her remember that they weren't old by any means, even if it felt like they'd seen the world and all its history ten times over by now. But never did he move himself in any way except for the steady rub of his fingers against one another, willing friction to keep him intact.

It was calculated, her effort, but rarely, if ever, did she find her calculations to be wrong.

Without a word, a sound, barely a breath, she slipped her arms around his middle. Simple hands under that ever-persistent trench coat. 

She pressed one against his back, let the warmth and the weight seep through his shirt in the hopes it would ground him, and rested the other atop it. Moving off the kind of muscle memory you never quite remember giving the time of repetition to, she even let the side of her face press against his chest. 

His heart thumped comfortably below her ear, her pearl stud digging into his pale blue shirt, through to the skin of his chest where he was real and she was real and they existed, momentarily, together.

Above her, he sighed through his nose, not of anger or of malice, but of barely contained regret and a soul-deep tiredness. She thought they'd stay locked like that, his arms limp at his sides, but slow as could be and faster than anyone had ever been, he wrapped them back around her, and dipped his head so as to press his nose comfortingly - for her or him, no one knew - into her hair. 

His breath tousled her hair, his arms heavy around her middle, and she sank- no, she fell. Fell into the shape of his arms and the way they curved perfectly to meet her, fell into the fact that he seemed to breathe a little bit easier with her leaned against him, fell into the fact that this was as close as they'd ever been and it tasted like nectar instead of the bitter root she'd tried to convince herself it would.

The light fixture above them hummed, the person next door clomped around in loud shoes, the light shifted through the daily motions from behind the blinds, but they stayed there until finally he found it in himself to speak.

With the clearance of his throat he said, "I'll see you in the morning, Scully," the words buzzing into her ear.

And on a hushed breath she replied, "Goodnight, Mulder."

But it was still a few more minutes before they disengaged.

×××

THE SOMEWHERE INBETWEEN 

It was abnormally sunny out for the air to still be as cold as it was. The brush outside the far window in Mulder's living room practically sparked in shades of unshakable emerald, yet the heat was chugging through the house on weak knees. 

Between the bred conundrums sat a sofa in the perfect patch of light, its fibers soaked through with rays that warmed, but didn't overheat, sparked dust motes, but nothing more.

They were draped lazily in it like cats, all spring-drunk and lakadaisical. Their phones sat side by side on the coffee table, ready at a moment's notice, and beside them the remainders of a lunch eaten with the urgency of having craved to experience food rather than inhale it while on the seemingly neverending stream of stakeouts.

Scully's fingers drew themselves through Mulder's hair absently where his head was pillowed in her lap, brushing it back from his face in a sticky repetition. In her other hand she held the side of her face, the skin of her cheek giving way under the heel of her palm as she tried to keep herself mostly upright.

She knew better than most how to wrench one's self from the pin sharp brink of sleep - had gone on more stakeouts and chased down more ticking clocks than should be allowed for any lifetime - but it was in the absence of need that she found herself holding soggy, ink-smeared instructions.

For once there was no immediate threat - there was always danger, of course, but the here and now was, for once, void of its usual metronomic countdown. For once it was a Sunday in which they had no obligation to be in uncomfortable chairs, tracking down the devil only knew what. 

For once, Mulder was still, and so was she. He with a book in his capable hands, and she with her eyelashes threatening to sweep her cheeks away into a sleep she'd left behind in the bedroom around the corner not four hours before.

She tried to refocus in on where she was reading along over his shoulder - unbeknownst to him, of course, which was how it would stay if she had any sort of say in it - and mostly succeeded in her covertness.

(Because like hell would she be caught willingly partaking in anything with _Phantom Felid_ in the title.)

"Scully," he mumured. The word molded around the thumb he had pressed into his bottom lip, taking shape in prolonged milliseconds. "Are you awake?"

A hum. No more an answer than it was a promise.

"Listen to this?" A question as much as it was a roadmap of the upcoming topography.

His feet hit the water before she even had her life-jacket on, quoting in pseudo-formality a particular passage about a hundred head of sheep that had met an untimely, unfortunate, unpleasant end by tooth and, presumably, by claw.

He dropped his thumb to the page after he was done, pressing it like a wildflower as the book fell shut and he tilted his head back to look up at her. She perched her eyes high, letting them flick across the author's name again on the front - tried not to anagram out her disbelief in the seventeen letters that made it - before free-falling to his.

His forehead wrinkled: _What do you make of it?_

She dipped her lips in venom and in antidote: _I think it's absolute bullshit._

Half a smile curled at his lips before turning back to face his written journey, leaning back into her touch as a quiet request. She pushed her thumb nail through his hair - longer now, but not so much - and to his scalp, not enough to leave a mark, but enough that he huffed a laugh through closed lips and turned to look back up at her.

"The last chapter," she started, knowing better than to dip her toe in this end of the pool, but doing so anyway as she'd been for so long. "Was twenty pages explaining England's history with the owning of exotic animals, specifically big cats, and how after the passing of the 1976 bill, people released these so-called pets into the wild as to avoid punishment. To suggest the phantasmal when the conclusion is so obviously-"

"If I'd known there was going to be a pop quiz I would've studied, Scully," he mumbled, additional grin laced with threads of smugness and something that might be pinned down as fondness given time.

"You could at least try not to look so pleased." A reminder, not gentle, but still made with a hand not heavy. 

"Oh, I'm not pleased at all, Scully- in fact, I'm feeling pretty terrible becuase if I'd known you were reading-"

"I wasn't reading, I was merely browsing my surroundings."

"If I'd known you were reading," he continued, always unperturbed. "I would have held the book up higher so you didn't have to strain to keep up."

"Smug isn't your color, Mulder."

"You're right. From what I've been told, it's navy."

×××

THE EVERLASTING I

Her mouth tasted like iron and stale coffee she had no recollection of ever drinking. She couldn't tell anymore what of the former was the byproduct of the three bodies she'd ventured into that day, and what was the bitter taste of her own blood. Her perfectly aligned molars had bit roughly into the soft inside of her cheek countless times now in an attempt to buy herself extra wakefulness.

It wasn't a lost cause so much as it was a wrong turn; she could keep going, had before in times innumerable, but she didn't want to, didn't feel that aching thrum in her veins urging her forward on this. It was well after a decent hour, had been for far too long, and she'd been on her feet for every minute. Now, she was desperate to find her road less traveled and take her sore calves down the path whose sights included a decent meal and a bed to rest in.

She relayed her final observations into her tape recorder, grissle-spackled gloves holding it tight toward her mouth. Eyes shut, she inhaled roughly, expelling with it the last of her findings before switching the device off.

It hit the metal of her table with a clatter, disrupting her bloodied utensils into a rattling chorus. She half-heartedly tapped them back into place before giving in and bracing her hands against the edge of the examination table in front of her.

Head dipped low between her extended arms, she groaned beneath her breath, a steady rooting of all the previous twenty-odd hour's worth of frustration.

"You're trying to scare off the new night shift?" It was disgusting, really, how much pep he still had in his voice. "Groaning coming from what's supposed to be an empty examination room in the dead of the night? The X-File writes itself."

"Mulder? Shut up."

She could feel his smile from across the room, stuck in its sheath as he moseyed over - keeping his berth around the table wide and the space between them infinitesimal. 

What it must be like, she wondered as his arm bumped against hers, to not reek of dried blood and desperation.

She straightened back out, feeling light on her feet, as if her head might Maleeni itself if she dared think about so much as swaying for the next couple minutes.

"Too late to file your reports," Mulder observed, though she'd clocked that particular truth when she stopped tracking her time hours beforehand.

Still, she knew what he was doing, had been the pitcher and the catcher for this particular game years on end. 

People always assumed that unlike Mulder, Scully knew when to quit. People always assumed that since she thought rationally, so went her behavior. People thought, guessed, missed the mark, in assuming that while she always had to drag him from the bottom of the unexplained bottle, he never had to do the same for her.

In some ways, it was harder to get her to release. She was a lockjawed pitbull on a length of rope, swinging for dear life because she had no excuse, no explanation. They stuck her in the basement, planned for it to be a six month at best excursion before they plunked her back at Quantico, but against all odds she'd found her footholds and planted her weight. It was an uphill battle to keep that door unlocked, that office without dust and plastic, but for her it was also a fight to have a place. Not against Mulder - Mulder who hadn't welcomed her with open arms, but who had done everything thereafter to make sure she wanted to stay - but against the men who begged her reports and findings and expertise, only to flippantly refuse her word because of what they found to be a misguided station.

Scully had her reasons for being there, had so many it felt like she might overflow, but that nagging voice at the back of her head always said that they wouldn't stand wear and tear. She needed something more, and that something was to be found in blue scrubs or with ink-stained, paper-cut hands.

Still, as much as those reasonings had held her in place, she needed help untying herself from them for the night from time to time. Mulder with his sure fingers, nimble and fair, always seemed to be able to be doing so without having to be asked.

"I'll fax them over in- in-" a yawn punctuated her already thick words, the last x in a column that made something in his face shift with an almost imperceptible softness.

"In the morning, yeah," he made sure to finish for her when he saw that she couldn't. They were always doing that - wrapping up for the other what they couldn't so as to make sure everyone had what closure they could get.

She gave a short exhale, taking in the finality of her plans and trying to patch them into her clockwork heart still click, click, clicking. The weight of her tiredness was growing by the second, and with it came the bend and sway of her body. 

Unsteady on her feet, she finally gave in. With a move deeply practiced, she leaned into his side, her head depressing his jacket sleeve and the skin beneath. 

His exhale was puffed high with amusement- no malintent, just simple and refined bliss as it brushed across her undoing hair.

"Stay still," she muttered, though somewhere in her chest she knew she was asking, _hold me up._

He didn't say anything, but his face shifted farther into love with each second - of course he would, of course.

Instead, he smiled that sticky smile that he could never seem to hide, even when hiding was all he knew, and did his best not to jostle her as he flagrantly ignored the request. He tucked her into his side, not minding the blood and viscera where it touched his rumpled suit. 

An arm around her to give her something to lean back against, a soft squeeze to her shoulder - _take as long as you need._ \- a kiss to the top of an already dropping head said everything he could even begin to think of.

From the outside looking in they were an inconsistent pair - wrinkled lines next to bloodied ones, suit half put together to scrubs spattered yet still in order - but nonetheless a pair they would always be.

×××

THE EVERLASTING II

They are: a woman with copper locks barely restrained in a vise-like claw clip, body swallowed in a ratty sweatshirt two sizes too big for her, holding out stained hands from a newly maintenanced car toward his unsuspecting face, where he had done his part only in holding the bobbing flashlight.

They are: thumping into yet another tiny hotel room with peeling wall paper and dried up carpet, but still carving out a space together atop scratchy blankets and sheets by kicking off shoes and mocking muted TV personalities over dinner so belated it should be breakfast.

They are: forevermore, forevermore, forevermore.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @foxmulldr (and my inbox is always open for prompts!!)


End file.
